Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., by James Earl Ray, a racist who despised King’s mission. But 10 years…
Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., by James Earl Ray, a racist who despised King’s mission. But 10 years before that, there was another attempt on King’s life — in New York City — which affected the civil-rights leader profoundly. And, as James L. Swanson explains in his new book, “ Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassin,” it came within an inch of changing the course of history.
In the fall of 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 29-year-old minister in Montgomery, Ala., who had recently risen to national prominence as a civil-rights activist, traveled to New York City to promote his first book. He almost didn’t make it out of town alive.
New York was his first stop on a national publicity tour for his book, “ Stride Toward Freedom .” The memoir was about his involvement in the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. King’s leadership of the boycott had transformed him from a little-known preacher into an important civil-rights leader. He was at the dawn of what promised to be a brilliant career.
King arrived in New York City on Monday, Sept. 15,1958. For several days, there would be book signings, media appearances and public events. A highlight of the trip was a rally of 5,000 people in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem on the evening of Friday, Sept. 19. The baseball star Jackie Robinson appeared onstage; musician Duke Ellington and his orchestra played; New York Gov. Averell Harriman and his opponent in the gubernatorial campaign, Nelson Rockefeller, made political speeches.
But there was one unhappy person that night, a well-dressed black woman who stood behind the speaker’s platform and heckled the white dignitaries as they addressed the crowd, yelling that she wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything white.
King ignored her.
“Many of you,” he said, “had hoped I would come here to bring you a message of hate against the white man . .. I come here with no such message. Black supremacy is just as bad as white supremacy. I come here with a message of love rather than hate. Don’t let any man make you stoop so low that you have hate. Have love in your hearts to those who would do you wrong.”
When the meeting was over, one of King’s hosts worriedly suggested that he consider having a bodyguard the next day — his last in New York.
King dismissed the idea.
On Saturday, Sept. 20, a little after 3 p.m., King arrived at Blumstein’s department store on West 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. A desk and chair had been set up for him in a roped-off area behind the shoe department on the first floor. He sat down and posed for photographs, including one with an honor guard of young black girls who wore sashes over their right shoulders, emblazoned with the name of their school, Wadleigh Junior High.
King began to sign books, devoting a little time to each guest, exchanging friendly words. When the line had dwindled to about 20 people, a woman suddenly cut to the front. She was tall and dressed in an attractive jacket, white blouse, blue skirt, and heels. She wore earrings and fashionable cat-eye glasses, and she carried a big handbag. No one seemed to realize it was the angry woman from the previous night. Her name was Izola Ware Curry. She was 42 and divorced, a Georgia native who had moved
to New York and had worked as a maid.
She paused in front of the desk. No one stood between her and King. She was much closer to him now than she’d been at the rally.
She faced King and looked into his eyes.
She possessed a loaded .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol that was concealed in her bra. She could have easily reached for it now, but she had another weapon hidden in her handbag, a Japanese letter opener in a bright crimson sheath. This was no ordinary letter opener: It was, according to someone who would soon have cause to examine it closely, an “extremely narrow, rigid, inflexible steel blade 6 to 8 inches in length, which had apparently been sharpened along its length to the point.” With its wood handle, it resembled a miniature samurai sword and had the penetrating power of an ice pick.
“Are you Martin Luther King?” She asked.
“Yes, I am,” King answered.
Curry shouted, “I’ve been after you for five years! You’ve made enough people suffer. I have to do it! I have to do it!”
For some reason, she had chosen the blade over the pistol, and gripping the letter opener in her hand, she thrust her arm up in the air.
King saw the blade bearing down on him and instinctively tried to parry it with his arm. His reaction deflected, but did not block, the blade’s momentum. It sliced his hand, inflicting a flesh wound. Then Curry buried the letter opener in King’s chest. It punched through his breastbone and lodged two and a quarter inches deep inside him. She had struck him so hard that the handle broke off.
Photographer Vernoll Coleman was at Blumstein’s doing publicity work for King’s publisher. “I was arranging a [photo] when the whole thing happened,” he said. “I thought the woman had simply swung at him or slapped him. But when I took a second look, I saw that thing sticking out of [his] chest.”
Coleman snapped a photograph that would appear in newspapers around the world: a dazed Martin Luther King, Jr., with a blade sticking out of his chest while a woman bent over him to wipe the blood from his wounded hand.
“Women began screaming,” the photographer recalled, “and the crowd tried to get at this woman.” One witness shouted, “She cut Dr. King!”
King hoped to calm them. “That’s all right!” He said. “That’s all right! Everything’s going to be all right.”
But he was in shock and he stayed seated. The dazed look on his face suggested that he did not fully comprehend what had just happened or how seriously he had been wounded. Blood oozed from the wound, staining his crisp white cotton dress shirt.
“I’ve been after him for years!” Curry screamed again. “I’m glad I done it!”
Then she tried to run away. The women in King’s entourage chased her. Waving their umbrellas like clubs, they shouted, “Catch her, don’t let her go!” Walter Pettiford, an advertising executive for the Amsterdam News, New York City’s leading black newspaper, grabbed her by the left arm and spun her around. Harry Dixon, the store’s floor manager, raised his hands and pleaded, “Please don’t harm her.”
A security guard named Clifford Jackson detained Curry, and he and a police officer hustled her out of the store and into a cab, bound for a nearby police station.
Someone approached King and reached for the letter opener, yielding to the irresistible temptation to yank the blade out, but a voice shouted, “Don’t pull it out. You’ll kill him.”
No one on the scene knew it, but the blade was so close to King’s aorta that any sudden expansion of his chest, from coughing or sneezing, could have pushed the main artery of the heart directly into the point of the blade. If that artery were punctured, King would bleed to death before he arrived at a hospital.
A police officer and paramedic carried King, still sitting in the chair, to the ambulance.
